Letter: Scargill never told a lie

M Harris, of no fixed abode, should be ashamed of his rantings in his attack on Dave Platt and the National Union of Mineworkers. I will deal with the three day week in a moment, but first the '’Empty shelves’. What empty shelves? In the seventies, I was in my thirties so remember them well. Here’s what I recall of your so called empty shelves Mr Harris. Let’s start with the price of meat. This country was very stable financially, prices went up by half a pence or a penny. Then all of a sudden (with the Tories in power) and the turning of the money from pounds, shilling and pennies, to decimal currency and 8/- (that’s eight shillings) became just 40 pence.

Farmers put up the price of meat. From nowhere, the price of beef etc went right through the roof! With the help of the Tory press and TV finding out how powerful they were, started quoting the price of meat in Germany, Italy and France, I recall Argentina jumping on the band wagon with tin corned beef, which was the cheapest meat in our shops at that time, shooting way up in price.

I’m prepared to bet that the poor farmers were prodding the Tory government to push up the price of a tin of corned beef to suit their purpose myself and my mates would sit in the pit and agree that we didn’t live in these countries so why should their prices effect us in Great Britain? We miners didn’t empty the shelves Mr Harris of no abode, it was the greedy farmers. In those far off days of the 1970s we had a slogan about farmers, they were all pleading poverty but no one had ever come across a poor farmer in Britain!.

After the ‘poor farmers’ diddled us over the meat, the price of grain went through the roof which meant the price of bread went through the roof with it! Is this your empty shelves yet again Mr Harris? But there were more empty shelves appearing in the shops. all of a sudden there were a shortage of bog rolls. Then when they did come back from nowhere onto our shelves.....the price of a bog roll had been doubled!

The three day week! We poorly paid miners were not responsible for the three day week, again the truth of that slogan  laid at the feet of the Tory government and yes, weak leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers. We miners had fallen far behind in the national league of wages. I recall at Maltby Main (my pit) we never earned as much as £20 per week! Remember that a £ note in the early 70s could buy a working miner at least six pints of beer!

I recall when the strikes of the early seventies came along, the prime minister, Ted Heath would come into my living room once a week giving us a lecture in how futile our strike action was. The pit that I left in Scotland in the mid 1960s were driving a mine from the coal face straight through to the Kincardine power station about five or six miles underground. The coal would never see the light of day. Mr Heath had me rolling off my couch with laughter when he kept telling us miners that these coal fired power stations could switch from coal to oil in 48 hours. What made me laugh so heartily was he could tell us that looking at us down a TV lens of a camera and keep a straight face. As I had a family to keep and was on strike more than working, I got the opportunity to go labouring to two plasterers on a building site. What a eye opener that was.

My wages jumped from about £18 at Maltby pit to £100 plus per week for mixing a bag of plaster. When that run out I got a local job on night shift at Multi Fruits loading lorries and that paid £120 per week. So, you see when Scargill called it the cheapest deep mined coal in the world, he wasn’t kidding anybody on, Mr Harris of no fixed abode.

It was indeed your Tory pals that created the three day week not the miners. The enemy within indeed were our own government! It was of course the Tories that forced the unions to become active, but I agree, they went too far.

I started by saying that you were probably a member of the breakaway union the UDM and that’s maybe where you are getting your wires crossed. It was proved that the leaders of that union were very much in the payroll of if not the NCB then the Tory party.

So that’s maybe where your patios, flash cars and fancy holidays were financed from. Or are you getting mixed up even further with the leaders of NACODS the deputy's union? The deputies were given an election to join the strike (it was their jobs as well we were fighting for) they voted by about 83 per cent, to join up on the picket line with the NUM but their national committee members were bought and sold not to go on strike. To this day, I still don’t know why the deputies didn’t vote with their feet, they had won the right to do so. If they had, then the strike would have folded in just over a month or so.

You say Mr Harris that Dave Platts (and I quote from your poor try at discrediting him) “ would have us believe that he is an unrepentant champion of the downtrodden, disadvantaged proletariat” — a stance strikingly familiar to that of the NUM leaders who bought new cars and had house extensions built whilst their members were on strike, starved. But David (Platt) how many disadvantaged proletariat own their own yacht- as you do? Mr Harris, I didn’t take pen to paper to defend Dave Platt (I only know him through these letter pages) but I’m sure he is very capable of defending himself and I hope he does. But what I do take offence with is the lies and untruths of our great union that you have chose to abuse. Myself, along with thousands and thousands of other miners in this country fought for the right to work. Scargill was ridiculed all over the land by the Tory press and TV. and the Labour party did nothing but stand by and watch. All I will say about Arthur Scargill is: “The man never told me a lie in his life! All he ever said has come true.”

I honestly think that you sat down and put pen to paper to ridicule Dave Platt's. Well, Mr Harris of no fixed abode, I sat down to ridicule and have fun at your expense, but at least I have done it by telling the truth. I will have you believe that Mr Platt is like myself a good socialist that deals in his telling the truth as he sees it. You my silly wee' laddie, are a self made man and a pretty poor model at that!

Mr DJ Brennan, retired miner, Maltby